From Static to Intelligent: Evolving SaaS Pricing with LLMs
Abstract
The SaaS paradigm has revolutionized software distribution by offering flexible pricing options to meet diverse customer needs. However, the rapid expansion of the SaaS market has introduced significant complexity for DevOps teams, who must manually manage and evolve pricing structures, an approach that is both time-consuming and prone to errors. The absence of automated tools for pricing analysis restricts the ability to efficiently evaluate, optimize, and scale these models. This paper proposes leveraging intelligent pricing (iPricing), dynamic, machine-readable pricing models, as a solution to these challenges. Intelligent pricing enables competitive analysis, streamlines operational decision-making, and supports continuous pricing evolution in response to market dynamics, leading to improved efficiency and accuracy. We present an LLM-driven approach that automates the transformation of static HTML pricing into iPricing, significantly improving efficiency and consistency while minimizing human error. Our implementation, AI4Pricing2Yaml, features a basic Information Extractor that uses web scraping and LLMs technologies to extract essential pricing components, plans, features, usage limits, and add-ons, from SaaS websites. Validation against a dataset of 30 distinct commercial SaaS, encompassing over 150 intelligent pricings, demonstrates the system's effectiveness in extracting the desired elements across all steps. However, challenges remain in addressing hallucinations, complex structures, and dynamic content. This work highlights the potential of automating intelligent pricing transformation to streamline SaaS pricing management, offering implications for improved consistency and scalability in an increasingly intricate pricing landscape. Future research will focus on refining extraction capabilities and enhancing the system's adaptability to a wider range of SaaS websites.